I am very excited by the prospect of working with these guys to develop ideas that have come from two pieces of research dealing with access and use of archival resources. My initial idea is to develop an app/software that will allow people to use archival sources- films, photographs, sound files etc to develop their own personal ‘archive’ which will enable them to tell their own story and also allow them to exchange and interact with others in some form of collective creative practice.

As I said in my application for this scheme

“The idea comes from two AHRC/BBC funded KEPs centred on the role of User Generated Content (UGC) and the development of genuine democratic engagements between the public and a range of cultural institutions. My work looked at opening up the BBC’s moving image archives and in exploring what types of interaction and joint endeavour could be possible and in looking at expectations and aspirations from a public and institutional perspective. As a consequence I am now ready to develop the next phase of this ongoing research and develop an application that can facilitate these exchanges and allow public audiences to become creative curators and to engage beyond the normative expectations of the ‘invited space’ offered by institutions. As we increasingly talk about the opportunities for self-expression and self-writing within expanding digital frames, this application could have the potential for genuine creative engagement. Organisations like the BBC, the British Library and the British Film Institute have just launched the Digital Public Space (DPS) which is a collaborative archive- of-archives built on the notion of free ‘democratic’ exchanges and in which acts of self-writing and the ‘national conversation’ can take place. This clearly signals a huge shift in the idea of ownership and the insularity of major institutions and offers the potential for exciting application development that would allow the public to take full advantage of increasingly available cultural resources and would be something that is not collection/institution specific.”

I hope that the project will allow me the opportunity to begin to explore the potential of this type of activity through a collaborative form of digital storytelling and to bottom-out some of its complexities and implications and to examine just what is possible in terms of design and interactivity. I expect to find it is a complex process!